The stars shone brightly, though most were masked by the ever-present light pollution of the city. Lucy slipped out the back door of her mom's apartment and hiked her backpack up as she breathed in the cool summer air. She was a bit old to be running away from home, heck, her parents had expected her to move out ages ago. That was back when she was still in college, still pursuing a mechanical engineering degree. Before the existential crisis that she had avoided talking about had knocked that goal over and beat it to death with a spiked baseball bat. And yet here she was, slipping out the back door an hour after sundown, her bag packed for hiking, with several wads of cash stashed in plastic bags sewed into the lining of her coat. It was a nice coat, the one she'd been turning into a cosplay before the traveling bug hit her. It would never be true armor, but it might save her a mauling if she ran afoul of a dog. And it's psychological armor value far eclipsed it's monetary value. A favorite Jacket can be like that.

The jacket was blue and green, a mix of panels sewn together to give it a segmented appearance. The edges of the panels hid the numerous pockets, several of which had thin sheets of plastic to stand in for armor plates, and a few of which held small tools Lucy liked to have access to. Denim, canvas, and a few synthetic materials were the primary textures. Lucy had gone with darker tones and a matte finish, to fit the aesthetic of a sci-fi special operator. She had even sewn a few LED straps into the wrists and shoulders, with the headcannon explanation that they allowed the agent to keep their hands free while exploring dark areas. Mostly they were an attempt to jazz up an otherwise easily overlooked costume.

Lucy took a look at the stars, and decided to follow Orion's aim. The constellation had guided navigation for ages, surely it could do so for her.

The Pike residence was situated in a suburb of New Chicago. As far as Lucy knew, old Chicago was still where it had been in America since it's founding. New Chicago shared a few traits with it's namesake: they were both cities, they had wealthy people and crime in proportions plausible for their size, and their Citizens toiled in a capitalist economy to keep themselves functional and entertained.

Lucy was not American, any more than she was pacific islander. That hadn't stopped the good old U.S. of A. from declaring the shores that New Chicago sat upon their own, in the same way they had Hawaii: a Navy flotilla had declared it so. The guns pointed at Averan had been a fair bit more powerful than the ones pointed at Hawaii, according to the history books, but that all had been far before Lucy's time. Nowadays people didn't care whether the stars and stripes flew on flagpoles, and the politicians in DC wasted taxes, so long as the power and internet kept running. Well, they grumbled at the taxes, but to do so was a tradition upheld by the first amendment, as her history teacher had asserted.

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Lucy made good time, taking the sidewalk east towards the countryside. It eventually grew cracked and weed-covered, and Lucy started to pass rundown and unoccupied dwellings. Humanity's distribution can often behave like a fluid, gaseous under certain pressures, liquid under others. When settlers had first come to Averan, they'd landed far from where New Chicago had sprouted. When their descendants established New Chicago, the environment had already been tamed enough to use rapid construction methods. Rather than the "hobbit holes" the settlers had lived in, New Chicago had steel skyscrapers and cellulose construction. (In the early 21st century, plywood had gone through several evolutions that stabilized into something that more closely resembled laminated fireproof cardboard. It didn't melt, and was an excellent insulator. Time and weather still took its toll, though, and when Lucy decided to perform a light bit of trespassing in an unkempt ranch-style, the windows weren't the only openings that air flowed through. It wasn't supposed to rain for a few days yet, so she didn't worry about roof integrity. Setting her pack down in what used to be the master bedroom, she unrolled a sleeping bag and lay down to catch some shuteye. Maybe tomorrow she'd reconsider things and swing back by her mom's place to pick up her phone and ID. But for now, she was blessedly untethered from the wider network of humanity.

#

"No, Azeran, you can't just go summoning humans for your army" Bralag, Duke of Molthan attempted to dissuade the Elven mage. "For one, it's against the kingdom's code of ethics to summon sapient beings. For another, ever since the twentieth century they almost all carry tethers. The only ones off grid are usually to stubborn or to weak to be of use."

"Hang the kingdom and its rules! I'm summoning a princess to serve as dragon-bait!" The insane mage declared, and promptly keeled over as Bralag crushed the sympathetic enchantment that kept poison from reaching Azeran's heart. His scapegoat thus secured, Bralag slit the Mage's wrist and activated the summoning circle that would draw a human of "noble blood" to it by way of higher-dimensional trickery. The surface of the circle rippled with a crimson light, and a sleeping woman appeared in it's center, her head supported by a hiking pack. The geas seemed to take hold without issue, placing a compulsion upon the sleeping woman to seek out a particular artifact from a dragon's horde, and then return it to the elves. The Duke didn't particularly expect her to have any success. With luck she'd be caught and added to the royal menagerie before she did to much damage. Whatever she did, it would be worth it to be rid of Azeran. Bralog would have killed the mage ages ago, but the magic commission was far to good at sniffing out perpetrators. But a case of human summoning would neatly distract them and give them incentive to bury the whole thing. The last human summoning had been so disastrous that an entire branch of the royal family tree had been struck from the history books.